New Delhi, May 28
Students aspiring for admissions to all centrally-funded technical institutes (CFTIs) in the country, including the IITs and the NITs, will be required to take only one entrance test from 2013. Accordingly, the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for admission to IITs and the All-India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) for admission to NITs and other engineering and technical colleges will be scrapped.

The decision was taken at a meeting of the councils of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) held under the chairmanship of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal today. The councils, which are the supreme decision-making bodies empowered by the IIT Act and the NIT Act, to take policy decisions on behalf of these institutes, agreed to switch to a new format of a common entrance test, as proposed by Sibal earlier.

The test will, for the first time, factor in the weightage of Class XII marks (normalised across state boards through an equalisation formula developed by the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata), besides the marks candidates obtained in the two components of the new single test (main and advanced), both to be held the same day in the morning and evening.

The IITs have, however, been granted special concessions on the ground that they are “different” from the rest and have initiated “experiments in technical education”.

The non-IIT technical institutes will prepare their final merit list for admissions on the basis of the following formula: 40 pc weightage to school-leaving exam marks and 30 pc weightage each to the marks obtained by candidates in the main and advanced tests of the single entrance exam. The IITs will follow a different format under which these would be required to factor in the school board exam marks only for the purpose of screening students for admissions to the IITs and not for actual
admissions.

The IITs will first screen students on the basis of a merit prepared by granting weightage to them in the ratio of 50 pc for Class XII exam marks and 50 pc for marks obtained in the “main” component of the test. The top 50,000 scorers on the merit list will be eligible for admission to the IITs and their “advanced” component papers alone will be evaluated by the IITs to prepare a final merit list for admissions. This merit list won’t have any place for school exam marks.

Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra have agreed to join the new format instead of having separate exams for state engineering colleges.

IITs will design both the main and the advanced components of the common engineering test and will join other institutes on a common format by 2015. Both tests, main and advanced, will be MCQ type and will be held the same day as against the wishes of IIT Senates that wanted the IIT advanced test to be subjective and to be held on a different day than the common engineering test.

Sibal, however, declined this suggestion of the IITs. “Our first priority was to reduce stress of exams on students and the next was to restore the importance of Class XII, which students don’t seem to take seriously,” Sibal noted.

Asked why the IITs were given special treatment, Sibal said the IITs were resisting any change to the JEE system and the ministry wanted to allow them some autonomy in admissions. Five out of seven Senates (faculty bodies) of the IITs wanted the test from 2014.

The Tribune had reported how Sibal had, on Saturday, told the Senate representatives that the issue of the common test commencing from 2013 was non-negotiable and the IIT Council would overrule the IIT Senate objections.

Admission formula

for
non-IITs

Marks in the school-leaving exam will get 40% weightage, while the marks obtained in the main and advanced tests of the single entrance exam will get 30% weightage each

for
IITs

Students will be screened on the basis of merit prepared by granting 50% weightage to Class XII exam and 50% to “main” component of the single entrance test. Top 50,000 scorers will be eligible for admission to IITs on the basis of scoring in the “advanced” component of the paper alone